Musical Gems on Twitter

I started a Twitter account just to post musical gems without long explanations.

The handle is @musical_gems.

And, of course, you can access the playlist. "Musical Gems" on Spotify, where my userid is kerkphil.

Muiscal Gems - You've got Another Thing Comin'

One of my favorite genres of music is hard rock.  Classic rock, punk, metal, power pop.  I really enjoy the sound of heavy electric guitars and pounding drums!.  I also love a good melody and there are actually some artists that can pull both of these off at the same time.  I have an growing playlist on Spotify (userid: kerkphil) called "Best Heavy Music" that showcases some of my favorites.

One such group is Judas Priest.  They are one of the pioneers of Heavy Metal, formed in 1969 and have been going strong since.  My favorite song by Judas Priest is "You've got Another Thing Comin'" from their 1982 album, Screaming for Vengance.

A Brush with Death!

We had an intense storm front blow through the DC area yesterday afternoon and it knocked out the power in our neighborhood for about eight hours.  It was tough, but as my Twitter feed shows, I am a survivor!

6:05 PM - 23 May 2019
Power has been out in my section of Arlington for almost 3 hours now.  I've slept for 2 1/2 of that, but it sure feels like the end of the world.

6:29 PM - 23 May 2019
Daylight is slowly fading and I fear the mobs with torches will materialize soon.

Musical Gems - Gimme Your Money Please

BTS is the nickname of a K-pop band known in Korean as 방탄소년단 which translates roughly as "bulletproof youth group."  My wife, who was born in Korea, is a big fan.  But long before there was BTS, there was BTO - Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

Bachman Turner Overdrive was founded in the early seventies.  Randy Bachman left the highly successful Canadian group, The Guess Who, in 1970.  He formed a new group, Brave Belt in 1971 with his brother Robbie and Chad Allen, a former bandmate from the Guess Who.  C. F. Turner and Randy's brother, Tim, joined the group after the first album.  Turner took over the lead vocals from Allen who left the group.  Brave Belt issued two albums and changed their name to Bachman-Turner Overdrive for the third album.  The group's name came from the two surnames in the group, Bachman (Randy, Robbi, and Tim) and Turner; and from the name of a trucking magazine they saw in the Colonial Steak House in Windsor, Ontario.

BTO's first album was the eponymous Bachman-Turner Overdrive.  And the first track on that album was a song called, "Gimme Your Money Please."

My First Kitty - Cindy

When I was about five years old, my family consisted of my parents, my younger brother, and myself.  We lived in San Gabriel, California and that was when I got my first cat.  She was a calico and I named her Cindy after a song by Eddie Fisher that my mother used to sing around the house, "Cindy Oh Cindy".  I distinctly remember the lyrics, "Cindy, oh Cindy, Cindy don't let me down."

Musical Gems - River

River Phoenix died early in the morning of October 31, 1993 at the age of 23.  He died of a heroine overdose in the presence of his sister Rain, brother Joaquin, and girlfriend Samantha Mathis outside of a nightclub on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, called the Viper Room.

Natalie Merchant was the lead singer and main songwriter for 10,000 Maniacs.  She left the band in 1993 and released her first solo album, Tigerlily, that same year.  She had three hits from this album, "Carnival", "Wonder", and "Jealousy".  But the best song on the album is called "River," and is a tribute/commentary on the death of River Phoenix, who was a friend.

https://play.google.com/music/listen?u=0#/album//Natalie+Merchant/Tigerlily

Musical Gems - Diary

Like my post on Lobo's song, "Don't Expect Me to Be Your Friend," this post is about a song of unrequited love.  This song is by the soft rock group, Bread, and dates from the same year, 1972.  It is called "Diary."

Bread was formed in Los Angeles in 1968 and had a string of hits in the early Seventies.  These included, "It Don't Matter to Me", "If", "Everything I Own", and "Lost Without Your Love."   "Diary" came from their album, Baby I'm-a Want You. It reached number 15 on the pop charts, and number 3 on the easy listening chart.

Musical Gems - Don't Expect Me to Be Your Friend

Music resonates with emotion, and love is one of the strongest emotions.  Last week I did a blog post about Dan Fogelberg's song, "Same Old Lang Syne," which was about an encounter with and old flame.  Today and tomorrow I am posting songs about unrequited love.  That is, love that is not returned by the object of one's affection.

The first is "Don't Expect Me to Be Your Friend", by Lobo.  Lobo is the stage name of Roland Kent LaVoie, who was born in 1943 in Tallahassee, Florida.  He had a string of soft rock \ easy listening hits in the Seventies.  These included, "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" and "I'd Love You to Want Me."  This song and "I'd love You to Want Me," are both from his 1972 album, Of a Simple Man.

Muscial Gems - The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

The Edmund Fitzgerald was a an iron ore freighter operating between Duluth, Minnesota and various iron works further downstream on the Great Lakes.  She sank in the midst of a winter storm at the eastern end of Lake Superior shortly after 7:10 p.m. on November 10, 1975 with the loss of all hands on board.

Gordon Lightfoot, a Canadian singer and songwriter, recorded a song called "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" a month later in December 1975.  The song was released in Agust of 1976.

Musical Gems - Same Old Lang Syne

Dan Fogelberg was a wonderful songwriter.  He had a string of hits in the late seventies and early eighties.  One could argue the the peak of his career was his 1981 album, The Innocent Age.  it contained such hits as, Run for Roses (about the Kentucky Derby), Leader of the Band (written in honor of his muscian father), and Hard to Say.  My favorite, however, is Same Old Lang Syne.

Musical Gems - Stoned

I'm in a musical mood this week, so here's another gem.  This one is by the Canadian band, Blackie and the Rodeo Kings.  I ran across this song 10 to 15 years ago when I was listening to Pandora.  It's a catchy tune with some nice guitar playing.

The band consists of Stephen Fearing, Colin Linden, and Tom Wilson, all of whom play guitar.

This song is from their 2003 album, BARK.  The lead singer for this song is Tom Wilson.  His deep voice is key to the song's appeal.  Listen to the song below.  Beware that the video is a bit weird, but the music is great!

What are the Odds? - Part 2

Back in July 2009, I noted that a man in Serbia, Radivoje Lajic, had just experienced the sixth meteorite impact on his home.  Mr. Lajic concluded that aliens were targeting his domicile.  I suggested that the odds of this happening by chance were about one-in-one quadrillion and concluded that one could not reject his hypothesis on purely statistical grounds.  It turns out I probably overstated the odds.

A coworker of mine, Aaron Betz, recently sent me an article in Wired from 2013 that gave the odds of being hit by any given meteorite at one-in-3,921,910,064,328.  The math can be found here.  Now this is only the probability for a single meteorite and literally thousands of objects impact the Earth's atmosphere every year.  However, best estimates are that only about 500 or so are large enough to leave a substantial meteorite.  If the typical person lives to age 80 that lowers the odds of having your home hit by a meteorite sometime during your lifetime to one-in-3379.  The probablility of being hit six times is 1:1.488 septillion (1.488E+24).  So, yes, the aliens are trying to kill the poor man!

On a related note, a man from Ohio, Gregg Nigl, managed the first perfect prediction for the first two rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament.  If the odds of any team winning a game in the tournament were 50/50 then the odds of pulling off Mr. Nigl's feat with a random guess would be 1:281 trillion.  The odds of a perfect prediction of all 63 games would be 1:9.223 quintillion (9.223E+18).

Of course the odds for any given game are NOT 50/50, so a perfect bracket is not as unlikely as that.  But still,...  Duke mathemetician, Jonathan Mattingly, has taken this into account an calculates that the odds of a perfect bracket are about 1:2.4 trillion, or about 3.8 million times more likely than the 50/50 odds.

Now you might think that these are really long odds, but lots and lots of people are filling out NCAA brackets each year so the odds of at least one of these people getting a perfect bracket must be pretty high.  Well there are 7.5 billion people in the world.  If each person in the world filled out a different bracket, then the odds of a perfect bracket amoung those 7.5 billion entries is 1:320.  Put another way, it would take 160 years of NCAA tournaments before the odds of a perfect bracket rise to 50 percent.  So don't hold your breath waiting.

For comparison purposes the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot on any given drawing are 1:292,201,338.

To summarize:

• You are 8200 times more likely to win the Powerball jackpot than you are to fill out a perfect NCAA bracket.
• You are 620 million times more likely to fill out a perfect bracket than you are to have your home hit by a meteorite six times.

Relative Sizes of Astronomical Objects

If Earth were the width of a hair, the sun would be 1 cm across and 1.2 meters away. Alpha Centauri would be 200 miles away. The Milky Way would be 10 times larger than the moon's orbit around the earth. The visible universe would be 3/4 of a light year across.

Here's the math.

Musical Gems - Something Good Coming

Tom Petty died on October 2nd, 2017.  He was one of America's most prolific singer\songwriters with a stretch of hits running from the late seventies up to his death.  He was the driving force behind Tom Petty and Heartbreakers and a member of the 1980's supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys.

He had a knack of putting together songs with catchy melodies and thought-provoking lyrics.  Something Good Coming from the Heartbreaker's 2010 Album, Mojo, is a good example.

Musical Gems - Pride (In the Name of Love)

Today's musical gem is, in my opinion, the quintessential U2 song.  This song has it all: solid catchy rhythm section from Adam Clayton on bass and Larry Mullen on drums, great vocals by Bono, and that signature delay and reverb from The Edge on lead guitar.  If I could only listen to one U2 song from now until the end of forever, this would be the one I'd choose.

Pride (In the Name of Love) was released in 1984 on The Unforgettable Fire album.  The lyrics are intentionally vague, but it's clear even to dense people like myself that the song is about Martin Luther King Jr.  The Unforgettable Fire was U2's fourth studio album and came between their breakout album, War, and their monster hit album, Joshua Tree.  Other great songs from this album are: A Sort of Homecoming, The Unforgettable Fire, and Bad.

Musical Memory Bank - Countdown

Today's muscial gem is a song from 1982 by the Canadian progressive rock band, Rush.  This one comes from the album, Signals.  The album also included the songs "New World Man" and "Subdivisions", which recieved a lot of airplay and are firmly established in most Best-of-Rush song lists.

Countdown is about the first launch of the space shuttle, Columbia, on April 12, 1981.  The two astronauts on board were John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen.  The members of Rush had front row seats and watched the launch from a VIP area at the Kennedy Space Center.

Musical Gems - Sultans of Swing

For this edition I chose, Sultans of Swing, by Dire Straits from their 1978 debut eponymous album.  This song is certainly on my list of top ten favorites of all time.

Musical Gems - Faster

Here is a great song by George Harrison.  This is from his 1979 album simply entitled, George Harrison.  The song is called "Faster" and it's about Formula 1 racing.  Specifically, it is inspired by  Formula 1 drivers, Jackie Stewart and Niki Lauda.  If you watch the video below, you'll see clips of George playing guitar and singing in the back of a limo; Jackie Stewart is the driver.

Musical Gems - The Heart of the Matter

My wife texted the kids and I the other day and asked us what was our fondest memory.  I was thinking about this on my commute to work on the DC Metro.  I listen to my Spotify playlists when I commute and it occurred to me that many of my fond memories are involked by listening to songs that trigger memories of where I was and what I was doing at some time when the song was playing.

Music triggers something primeval.  The only thing as powerful for provolking memories for me, is when I smell certain aromas from my past.

I have a list on my Spotify account (userid: kerkphil) called "Real Gems," and I realized that I like these song just as much for the memories they prompt as I do for the quality of the voices, the playing, and the lyrics.  So I've decide to slowly introduce some of these songs.

The one I chose for today is the last song that played as I was coming home today.  It's entitled, "The Heart of the Matter," and it appeared on Don Henley's 1989 album, The End of the Innocence.